Quiltiliciousjourney.blogspot.com's blog

This is my "archive" blog, from Vox.com. I am currently blogging over at Blogger at http://quiltiliciousjourney.blogspot.com

Oven Mitt Pattern

Just last month, I wrote my first craft pattern and posted it on my website. It's for Fingertip Oven Mitts (and I made a ton of them for gifts for the holidays). The pattern is on this page (it's a PDF download).

Here is a pair of mitts that I made for the holidays:

Fingertip Oven Mitts

More bags

I've been enjoying using up all my scraps and doing these small purses. I just finished these three:

The Betty Boop fabric bag has hearts quilted all over, and uses up leftover blocks from the Elemental Baby Quilt that I made for my friend Anne and Alan's baby, Bowie, about 3-4 years ago. It felt really good to use up the leftover rail fence blocks and strips that have literally been hanging in my sewing room from a curtain rod for a long time. I really enjoyed doing the fine detail work in this bag - there is a tiny pocket on the back, and a dimensional piece on the front flap.

The two green bags, one a purse-size bag with shoulder strap, and the other a small clutch, were created from the same bargello "fabric" that I made with green strip scraps from a recent purchase of "scraps by the pound" from eQuilter. The small clutch is quilted with a leaf pattern and the purse is quilted with a meandering loop pattern.

These all have non-zipper closures. Betty  Boop  has a velcro closure, and the green bags have a button and loop closure. They are all for sale at my Etsy shop.

A really nice purple bag that I made a couple of weeks ago didn't last 10 minutes on Etsy before someone bought it. I'm hoping this luck will hold for these as well.

PurpleBag1

Bowls and Bags

I received a Clothtilde catalog in the mail over the New Year's break, and discovered coil bowls. I decided to try making a couple of them, using the two techniques I found online: one has you folding a 2 1/2" strip of fabric tight around a cotton clothesline and stitching it down; the other has you wrapping a 1" strip around the clothesline.

I did not like the results I got from the fold and sew. I had a lot of difficulty getting the cord centered under the presser foot, and it wound up looking like finished-edge piping. The "bowl" seemed more like a hat. The cotton cording I used for this was also very floppy, which contributed to the hat-ness of the finished product, rather than imbuing the piece with bowl-like qualities.

I then decided to try the other technique, which is explained here. I also used much stiffer polyester cording that was purchased for making upholstery piping for the living room couch. The stiffness of the cording makes a big difference in the end product. Here is a picture of the finished bowl. The base is 9 inches in diameter and it stands about 6 or 7 inches tall.

I am currently working on another one using much fatter cording (1/2-inch rather than 1/4 inch). The cording is soft and floppy, and the bowl is coming out rather shallow, and it's not nearly as nice. So I recommend some stiff cording. I haven't purchase commercial cotton clothesline in ages, so I don't know how stiff that is. I also don't know how the price compares to piping cording (my local upholstery fabric store sells piping for 15-20 cents per yard).

The bowl patterns in the catalog suggest that you use Bali jelly rolls, since they are pre-cut 2 1/2-inch strips and they are also color coordinated so you get a nice gradation. I think it's a very good way to use up all your strip scraps you have lying around. You get a much more "eclectic" color combination. I am using up my strips from the "strippers scrap bag" that I bought from eQuilter a few years ago, and it contains some fabrics that I'd never know what to do with otherwise (Care Bears with glow in the dark clouds? I had no idea - but now the bottom of my bowl has glowing blotches when the lights are out.)

Bags

The other thing I found intriguing were patterns for cosmetic bags. These looked like fun to make, and the one I have now is too small, and my teenage daughter needs an oversize one. So I purchased a pattern instead of trying to figure out how to do this myself. The challenge for me was the setting of the zipper in a piece that isn't a garment. The fabric store mentioned above had a nice assortment of heavy-duty zippers for 50 cents each, so I grabbed a few.

The red bag is mine, and I made it with most of the red strips from my scrap bag. I didn't bother straightening out the edges of the strips, either, because I wanted to give it a wonky, scrappy appearance. The Bargello element was actually an afterthought, but I think it totally makes the bag. The little strap was made from a leftover Bargello strip, and the button was from a "scrap bag" of buttons I picked up somewhere. Since this was the first one I've ever made, there were a lot of things I felt I needed to correct, which wound up making a lot of hand-work. Even so, I finished that one (including the quilting) in about 3 hours.

The blue Hello Kitty bag is my daughters, and it took slightly longer to finish, because I decided to use some stretchy sparkle thread in the quilting that my machine did NOT like. After wrestling with it for about 1 hour, I gave up and put it in the bobbin, and quilted the piece upside down with a meander over the whole fabric, and didn't try to outline any more cats with thread. My daughter is very happy with it, and that's really what counts.

Round Robin Quilt, Completed

A little over a year ago, I started participating in a round robin group on LiveJournal. For those that might not know, a round robin quilt is made by a group of quilters who make a center block, and pass the block off to another quilter in the round, who then puts a border on it, and passes the quilt to the next person. So if you have a 5-person group, there are five quilts being made, and after the fifth round, the quilt returns to the person who did the center block.

Well, the quilt top came back to me sometime in late July or August, and I added a final border to make it a good "couch quilt" for me to snuggle under in the winter. There it sat for a while, while I figured out how I was going to quilt the thing. Now it's done, and I'm happy with it. Happy enough to enter it in a local guild show in November. I call it "Horsin' Around" from the Laurel Birch horse fabric used in the quilt.

Horsin_Around.jpg

I tried a few different quilting styles in each of the borders. The outside border is quilted with a neolithic horse outline that is a combination of art I've seen in photographs in the Lascaux caves in France, and the Laurel Birch horse fabrics that are used in the quilt.

Horsin_Around_back.jpg

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Some finished quilts and works in progress

I finished a couple of quilts, and have to take a break from piecing fabric in favor of starting an upholstery project - our living room couch needs new cushions (more on that in my LiveJournal blog). For now, here are some photos of what I've been working on since I got my new machine in December:

First the commissioned quilt, which will be going to Janice Jamieson for long-arm quilting (it's a gigantic king-sized quilt, 113" on a side. I am not going to attempt to quilt that with what I have). Here is the design from EQ6:

Commissioned quilt

And here is the finished quilt top (the photo is a  bit dark - there are a lot of metallic prints in the quilt that just don't show up in the photo, especially the outer borders).

DSCN6238

And here is my first foray into fusible applique, with a kit. I am going to "frame" it with some fabric and then quilt it for a small wall hanging.

DSCN6233

Design Your Own Fabrics

I don't know if the buzz has made it to this community yet, but there is a small company in South Carolina called Spoonflower  that lets you create your own fabrics in small quantities (1/4 - 3 yards) at reasonable prices for custom, short run type work.

I think this is the most incredible thing. I've already created my account, and my first project is going to be quilt labels. The printable fabric for the ink jet printer isn't cutting it anymore for me. It's too stiff and I don't think the inks are as colorfast as I'd like.

I haven't seen any fabric from them yet, but they are using Moda fabric as their base. I will let you all know how the labels turn out.

Late Yule/Christmas Present

Here it is, Christmas day, and my daughter's present isn't done yet :(

However, I had the top pieced by the time she got home from my mother-in-law's Xmas Eve thing, and I blew her away with it. She is 14, and is currently in love with the Beatles, and we've all loved the cartoon Yellow Submarine for ages (As an aside, we also loved the animator's other big film, The Thief and the Cobbler at least as much). Anyway, a few months ago, eQuilter sent me a newsletter announcing a whole line of Yellow Sumbarine fabrics, and wasting no time, I ordered a pile of them, at least 1 yard of almost all the selections. I did show her the fabrics when they came in, because I suck at keeping surpises, but she had no idea what I was going to do with them. Heh. Heh....

Anyway, the top is almost done. I have to fix one corner that I made an inch too short for a miter (dammit), and I think it desperately needs a black border to frame it, especially since I'm going to be using a rainbow striped fabric (that almost matches the printed stripe around the panels) as the binding.

I took the opportunity to do my first bargello with 6 of the fabrics - I wasn't sure how to work them in with all the panels and medallions from the fabric called "Fab Four Frames" that I used as borders around the panel prints. I managed to get all of the conflicting colors and designs to work in that section at least.

The quilt back is going to be the first fabric shown on the eQuilter page referenced above.

P1000051

Some Quickie Book Reviews

I just received my latest Amazon shipment in the mail today. I ordered 4 machine quilting books. I got 60 Machine Quilting Patterns by Pat Holly and Sue Nickels, Machine Quilting Made Easy by Maurine Noble,  Continuous Line Quilting Designs by Pat Cody, and Add-a-Line Continuous Quilting Patterns by Janie Donaldson.

My favorite right now out of all of these is Machine Quilting Made Easy by Maurine Noble, and not just because I feel like I came up with "Made Easy" for books when I was writing "Upgrades Made Easy" at Avaya for their technicians (but all these other "made easy" books came out afterward... just saying). Ms. Noble provides a series of exercises that are similar to the teach-yourself-airbrushing books and videos that I went through when I was learning how to use my airbrush. This is just what the doctor ordered, as far as I'm concerned. I have something to practice different techniques, and some solid, well-written instruction.

I guess I needed someone to tell me to practice on some muslin-and-batting sandwiches, because it didn't occur to me to do that on my own. I'd just fool around with an intricately-pieced quilt top, and create something that I"m not really proud of.

The other books have some nice designs that I may use directly or as inspriation for other quilting patterns. The Add-a-Line Continuous Quilting Patterns is really for pantograph quilting (I'm guessing for long-arm machines) which I don't have, so I'm not sure how useful this book is going to be for me in the forseeable future. It's going to be a long time before I get myself a long-arm machine. But the designs in thre are pretty - the whole animal patterns for the squirrel and the zebra are cute.

While we're on the subject of animals, the Cody book, Continuous Line Quilting Designs, has some adorable cat and dog border quilting patterns. This book feels more "utilitarian" as all the pages are on graph paper, which makes it easy to resize the designs as needed. The designs in this book are edge patterns and I think many of them can be accomplished with a walking foot instead of free-motion quilting.

The Cody book and 60 Machine Quilting Patterns by Pat Holly and Sue Nickels are both from the Dover Needle Arts series of books. I'm a big Dover fan; their books are very reasonably priced. The Holly/Nickels book contains some very nice central block patterns and continuous line border patterns. They are presented on one side of the paper as a lot of Dover books are, so that you can remove the page and just get the design you want, and even use it as a template without losing another design.

All-in-all, these are decent books, and I don't feel like I wasted my gift card.

Amazon Quilting books on sale

Trying Some Applique Techniques

I want to get better at applique, so I bought a couple of the Rachel's Cat Garden Block kits from someone on eBay. Then I was thinking it would be fun to reproduce some of my favorite fruit crate labels in a nice big quilt. I picked out probably 20 or so to choose from. I started with the "template process" for my favorite fruit crate label of all time: Tom Cat (I had a print of this hanging in my dorm room in college).

Here's the fruit crate label:

06a67bf6-20a7-4a6d-b8c6-f14d7f56ee3c

I put it into Adobe Illustrator and basically traced around the basic shapes to get my cutting templates:

TomCat-Template

I'm planning to add most of the details in thread or possibly fabric ink, specifically the whiskers, the eye slits, paw details, the sunkist logo and maybe some shading. I'm also going to satin-stitch around the lettering (to hold it down and also to put in the yellow-orange outline around the letters). The finished panel will be 24x15. I'm pretty excited about this project - it will probably take me forever, and I have to learn some new techniques before I really get into it, but this panel, at least, seems straighforward, and I think it's only 15 pieces of fabric for the image (not including the letters).

Now that I have a tuxedo cat in the house, I feel the need to immoratlize her in my art (and she looks pretty similar to this cat, too, except her front paws just have white on the toes).